It’s my pleasure to announce that the Show-Me Institute now has an Android App! Click here or the screenshots below to download it. Now you can stay up-to-date on Missouri free-market issues wherever you are: Just click the icon, and away you go. Feature requests are very much welcome.
It’s no secret that the cost of public education has ballooned, with little to show for it. During the past four decades, education spending has more than doubled, even after accounting for inflation. And yet, student achievement has not improved.
Obviously, no single solution can fix the large problem of education in the United States. But, a general strategy that we can use to improve education is to allow more innovation in the classroom so that we can find better ways to help students learn.
This summer, we released Caitlin Hartsell’s paper on virtual forms of education that are available to public school students, one type of classroom innovation. Digital learning can describe a variety of learning environments, including a student taking a class remotely, or a student working through exercises on a computer with assistance from the classroom teacher.
Hartsell pointed out that digital learning in Missouri is not rare — as a state, we’ve had some forms of digital learning for more than a decade. Rural schools, for example, share courses via interactive television as a way to offer courses (like foreign language and upper level math courses) they otherwise might not be able to offer students.
But there’s much more that could be improved. According to Digital Learning Now’s report card for Missouri, state law does not stipulate that student achievement data be used to evaluate the quality of individual online courses, nor does state law require that failing individual course providers be closed.
If you have been following calls to close failing charter schools here in St. Louis, the lack of such requirements certainly seems troubling.
Somehow, it seems appropriate that the announcement of Digital Learning Day, a national campaign to highlight innovative and successful uses of digital technology in public education, came during the same week that the new iPhone update was announced. We are increasingly using technology to improve our lives. It makes sense that we should extend the use of technology to the classroom.
Digital Learning Day is Feb. 1, 2012. Read more about that effort here. And, of course, stay tuned to the blog. We will continue to update you with more news about education policy.
I have a request of the urban planning firms in Missouri. I would like to see examples where cities, counties, etc., hired a planning firm to determine the appropriateness of a blighting, conservation, etc., declaration for the purpose of TIF (Tax Increment Financing) or other types of abatements / incentives, and were told “no, they are not applicable here” by the urban planning firm. Are there any such examples, anywhere in Missouri, where planning firms that governments hired gave a negative answer to these types of questions? And I mean a completely negative answer, not a “you can’t do this, but you can do this” answer.
If anyone with a planning firm can send me any such examples, I would appreciate it. You can send them directly to me ([email protected]) or post them in the comments. My guess is that a totally negative answer has never happened in Missouri, at least in the past 20 years. I won’t be totally surprised if it has happened on a very few occasions, and I’d love to be proven wrong by finding a number of examples where it has occurred.
Andrew Puzder pulled the famous fast-food chain back from the brink of bankruptcy, so he knows something about creating jobs in a tough economic environment. Puzder, the CEO of CKE, will join the Show-Me Institute, the Saint Louis University John Cook School of Business, and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation on Tuesday night at the John Cook School of Business to talk about his new book, “Job Creation: How It Really Works and Why the Government Doesn’t Understand It.”
You’ll want to hear what he has to say. Reservations are required, so be sure to RSVP for the St. Louis event here.
SAINT LOUIS – The Show-Me Institute announced its spring internship program today.
Interns at the Show-Me Institute Internship are involved in virtually all aspects of the institute’s operations, working closely with senior staff on a wide variety of projects. Show-Me Institute interns develop an in-depth understanding of how a think tank works, including editing and publishing, event planning, and occasional travel around the state.
Recent interns have also had articles published in newspapers throughout the state, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Columbia Daily Tribune, the Springfield News-Leader, the Kansas City Daily Record, the St. Louis American, and the St. Louis Business Journal.
The spring internship runs from January through May, and will be held at the institute’s offices in downtown Clayton. Interns receive a modest stipend.
Applications are . The application deadline is December 2.
Over the last few months, we have worked hard to make the following point crystal clear: Tax credits that are narrowly tailored to benefit a powerful elite or fail to produce the return promised to taxpayers should be opposed when proposed, and mitigated or eliminated if enacted. The Aerotropolis tax credit was initially introduced as a nearly half-billion dollar behemoth. Today, the proposed tax credit program stands at $60 million, with the most problematic portion — the real estate credits — removed. The remaining $60 million poses concerns, as well, and legislators should take a hard look at whether the credit is going to be taxpayer money well-spent.
But there are other parts of the bill that includes Aerotropolis that deserve attention. Although the legislation is peppered with a grab-bag of new incentive programs of questionable value to the state, there is a fair chance that two enormous tax credits — the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and Historic Tax Credit (HTC) — may be phased out if the so-called “jobs bill” is going make it to the governor’s desk (emphasis mine).
Gov. Jay Nixon called the Legislature into special session on Sept. 6 to overhaul the state’s tax credits, which cost the general revenue fund more than $540 million a year. Nixon wanted legislators to scale back some programs while adding a few new ones, such as a tax break to spur development of a hub in St. Louis for freight flown between the Midwest and China.
But an agreement forged last summer by House and Senate Republican leaders fell apart, leaving the two chambers split over how much to cut and whether to set expiration dates or ‘sunsets” for programs that fund historic preservation and low-income housing development.
Senators remain committed to passage of seven-year sunset clauses, Mayer said Tuesday. An alternative review process proposed by Rep. Ryan Silvey, R-Kansas City, would not corral the programs’ growing costs, Mayer said.
The proposed “alternative review process” is underwhelming to say the least, and as a solitary legislative move, would force no substantive action on Missouri’s burgeoning tax credit system until at least 2016, if ever. The heart of the problem is that while the presumption in the House is that the tax credit system should exist largely (and for all intents and purposes, indefinitely) in its current form, in fact, many tax credits need to be extinguished, most sooner rather than later, and all need to be seriously investigated as to whether they’re achieving their objectives.
This is where the sunsets play a role. Sunset provisions like the one proposed turn the old tax credit presumption on its head, phasing out programs like LIHTC and HTC — which, in the state’s own analysis, do not even remotely pay for themselves — but nonetheless giving the legislature an opportunity to reduce and reform the programs in the interim. On an ideological spectrum, that is the conservative position: responsibly reducing the size and scope of government.
LIHTC and HTC combined have carved out billions of dollars from the state budget over the last decade, with disappointing economic results. If Missouri’s legislature can’t responsibly reform these two programs within a seven-year window, there’s no reason to believe the legislature will ever reform the programs.
“For over a hundred years,” F.A. Hayek wrote in 1961, “we have been exhorted to embrace socialism because it would give us more goods. Since it has so lamentably failed to achieve this…we are now urged to adopt it because more goods after all are not important.”
As a long-time teacher of economics in Missouri, I believe that Hayek’s words are just as apt today as they were 50 years ago. Here we live in a country that has been singularly successful both in creating material prosperity and enabling more and more people to enjoy the blessings of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet despite this unrivaled record of success, many of those entrusted with the education of our children regard capitalism, the engine of the nation’s prosperity, not as something to be celebrated, but as something deplorable or shameful.
I have seen first-hand how an aversion to free markets, competition, and economic logic permeates our classrooms. To cite one example, a good friend of mine once invited a professor of education to collaborate in designing a summer curriculum on entrepreneurship for disadvantaged youth in Saint Louis. The professor, a prominent member of his university’s college of education, was aghast. He told my friend that entrepreneurship is the very antithesis of education and the teaching of good citizenship. And over the past 12 years, that is the world view that he has inculcated in hundreds if not thousands of future teachers at all levels of education.
Consider the daughter of my friend. Her teacher, while discussing the environment and the spotted owl, denounced the meat and fur industries. The daughter, parroting her teacher, told her mother that the government should ban both industries. Noticing the obvious slant to the curriculum, mom challenged her daughter to compare the benefits and costs, including the loss of jobs and income. Daughter, resorting to ideological labels in lieu of reasoned response (a sure sign of educational neglect), declared her mother a “capitalist pig.”
Why this bias? Could it be that educators identify entrepreneurial free markets as win-lose zero sum confrontations? One’s gain must be another’s loss? Perhaps they imagine the violent overthrow of kind cooperation in favor of brutal aggression and profit. Self-esteem is sacrificed to the survival of the fittest. The very thought, however fanciful, rattles the nerves of educators.
Market competition, in fact, brings people together through voluntary exchange. You satisfy your own needs by discovering ways to satisfy the needs of others. This evolution from self-sufficient individuals to interdependent beings elevates social cooperation from a generous impulse to the essential linchpin supporting our means of survival. This should warm the hearts of educators everywhere.
Now consider what happens when governments replace entrepreneurs in picking the winners and losers. For example, analyze the multitude of tax credits that Missouri government gives away to insiders with lobbyists. Here, taxpayers are coerced into financing the Taj Mahals of wellconnected developers. Far from a cooperative game of willing participants, this is favoritism for the few, which eliminates competition and promotes waste.
Competition and free markets are the best assurances of social cooperation and peaceful coexistence. That is what we should be teaching our children. Even more, it is what we should be teaching our teachers.
Gregory Aubuchon is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri Public Policy.
